Went through the BCG EM process earlier this year for their tech build practice. I've managed engineering teams at two other companies so I came in with experience, but BCG was genuinely different in ways I didn't anticipate.
First thing: this is not a standard tech company EM loop. BCG is a consulting firm first. The engineering manager role there involves client-facing work, managing engineers who are embedded on consulting engagements, and operating in environments where the business context shifts every few months. Keep that in mind.
The loop had four substantive rounds after the recruiter screen.
Technical fluency (not a coding round) They did not ask me to whiteboard or code. What they did was present a real architectural scenario: a client's legacy data warehouse migration with a tight timeline. How do you scope it? How do you protect the team's velocity when the business is pressuring for weekly demos? I basically ran a hypothetical stakeholder conversation with the interviewer playing the client. The bar was: can you talk credibly about technical trade-offs without being dismissive of business reality.
People management deep-dive Two interviewers, 90 minutes, all behavioral. Situations they probed: managing an underperforming engineer in a high-visibility project, navigating a dispute between a tech lead and a client stakeholder, building a team culture when your people are on different client sites and mostly remote. BCG also asked a few questions about feedback: how do you give a strong engineer feedback that their communication is hurting client relationships? That one required nuance.
Case interview (yes, for EM) This was the most surprising part. A structured business problem, about 40 minutes. You're not expected to crack it the way an associate would, but they want to see that you can think in client terms, not just engineering terms. I'd practiced exactly zero cases and it showed. I passed but it was my weakest round.
Cross-functional panel This was with a mix of consultants and one other engineering manager. Questions around how you collaborate with the consulting side of the house, how you earn credibility with client stakeholders who didn't hire you. Soft skills but with real stakes behind them.
End-to-end the process was about 7 weeks. I got the offer. If you're used to pure tech EM loops, add at least a week of case prep and think hard about how to frame your experience in client-impact terms.